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Testing to target food fraud

The substitution of horsemeat for beef in Europe last year led to more Australian companies testing food products.

AFP: Christophe Simon

From fake honey, to horsemeat dressed up as beef, cases of food fraud are increasingly making headlines.

While food fraud is causing concern for consumers, it's also a big problem for retailers and food manufacturers and the industry is responding by ramping up testing regimes and developing new technologies that can identify dodgy ingredients and spot fake food.

Michael Jackson, managing director of the Australian Wool Testing Authority (AWTA), which owns independent food testing laboratory Agrifood Technology, says testing for food quality, nutritional values, allergens, chemical residues and toxins, as well as fraud, is becoming more common in the Australian food industry.

"I think the retailers, particularly, who are selling goods are looking at their suppliers to insist that they've got professional Q.A (quality assurance) systems in place to make sure there won't be problems of a food safety nature when you have the embarrassment of product recalls and all the things that go with that, not to mention potentially harming people," Mr Jackson said.

He says international events, like the horsemeat substitution scandal, which saw horsemeat passed off as beef in pre-packaged products like lasagne in Europe last year, often lead to a spike in Australian companies requesting tests of food products.

"We all know about the horsemeat substitution scandal and that was the type of event that provoked a lot of retailers in Australia to get some testing done, to check and double check that they were not inadvertently part of that food fraud scheme," Mr Jackson said.

Matthew Hill, a food chemist working for technology company PerkinElmer, selling mass spectrometers and infra-red spectrophotometers that can detect minute levels of impurities in food products, says demand for the technology is increasing in the wake of international food fraud scandals.

"We've seen overseas various issues within certain sectors of the food market where people have been diluting down products, or been introducing supplements that are either harmful to the environment, or human health, or not what people are paying for, they are diluting down products so they can get better value through their supply chain," Mr Hill said.

He says testing equipment is currently being used to detect olive oil that has been diluted down with soya bean oil and pomegranate juice diluted with red grape juice.

PerkinElmer has also developed specific testing equipment to analyse milk powder, and Mr Hill says its selling well in China, where several babies died in 2008 after consuming milk powder that had been tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Mr Hill predicts the technology will become more sophisticated and able to detect smaller particles.

"I think it will be a case of the spectrophotometers will get more and more sensitive.

"We can see right down to levels of detection that were never thought of previously. It's not too long ago when seeing parts per million in a solid sample was extremely difficult and now we've got products that can see residues of pesticides in soils, waters and food down to sub-part per billion level.

"It's just as the technology advances, the limits of detection will advance as well."